To protect Western toads we must protect grizzly bears, and to protect grizzly bears we must protect habitat. Pacific Wild interviewed renowned bear biologist, Wayne McCrory, on the importance of umbrella species in maintaining ecosystem health and the challenges he faces in protecting biodiversity within his community.
Governments worldwide, including Canada, have pledged to conserve 30% of lands and waters by 2030 to safeguard biodiversity. However, these plans are easily redirected by extractive industries, sacrificing biodiversity. From grizzlies, to toads, to caribou, safeguarding biodiversity depends on protecting large, intact and interconnected habitat areas.
My name is Wayne McCrory.
I’m a registered professional biologist in British Columbia. I’ve studied grizzly bears off and on for the last 40 to 50 years.
Right now, we’re up on the mountainside in an area between the central Selkirks’s on the north and Goat Range Park and the Kokanee Range on the south. This is a major grizzly bear cross valley corridor that isn’t protected.
Grizzly bears are very vulnerable for a whole variety of reasons.
A female grizzly won’t have young until she’s 4 or 5 years old, and then she takes 3 or 4 or 5 years to raise them, depending on the ecosystem and the food availability.
The other thing is that they cover very large areas. You know, they have sort of an internal memory map of where all the huckleberry patches and where the salmon are and where the green plants are, they can feed on in the summer in the riparian areas.
And so especially in the interior in the drier areas, they have very large home ranges. They utilize a lot of different habitats. And in doing so they spread huckleberry seeds through their scat. When they dig for glacier lily corm, you’ll see fields totally dug up and that recycles the nutrients in the soil.
When you go to a coastal temperate rainforest where they feed on salmon, studies by doctor Tom Reimchen, and others at the University of Victoria show that they actually fertilize the surrounding forests, which is depauperate of nitrogen.
So here we are in the B.C. Timber Sales clear cut. And when you look at the edge of the clear cut, you see a big windstorm came here and caused all these blow downs, even on the road here. And even a grizzly bear couldn’t travel through here.
This is the way we’re treating land, this is the way we’re treating a grizzly bear corridor. And there’s more logging planned here, too.
It’s just like, how do you protect it?
A year ago, the Valhalla Society hired a lawyer, environmental lawyer, and we’re applying for a wildlife habitat area for this whole area that connects the Goat Range Park to the north and the south to try and get some protection.
It still doesn’t exclude recreation use. You can allow some logging. It’s not even full protection. And then it has to go through a 2 or 3 year review process. So by the time that happens there’ll be more logging here and stuff.
And so that’s the challenges we face at this level.
They’re a keystone species, so by protecting grizzly bears and their habitats over large areas there’s all kinds of other species. you’re protecting as well: ungulates, mountain goats, deer, Roosevelt elk on the coast. elk in interior, in this area. If this area was protected, we’d protect the population of western toads and so on. So, yeah, all the way down the great diversity we’d be protecting.
People say, well, you’re 81. Why aren’t you retiring?
Why retire? You know, there’s so much to be done.
And as I told my wife, when she asked me, I said, well, you know, better to go down fighting.
Which is what I, what I hope to keep doing.
